This story continues to not go as planned. This chapter was not supposed to be one long conversation between Maria and the kids in the schoolroom, but whenever I tried to make them shut up and move around, they just found more things to talk about. As a disclaimer, there's a slight anachronism in this chapter; children and young people drinking coffee was much more common in this setting, so realistically, Maria probably would not have objected.


Chapter 16
Coffee and Liquor

The children weren't as enthusiastic about their regular schoolwork as they were about teaching their own lessons, but for the most part, they proved to be good students. Liesl and Friedrich were still sleeping in later than their siblings each morning, but they were always in their desks and ready to start school when they were supposed to be. Liesl often brought her coffee cup with her and sipped from it as she read her schoolbooks. Maria had thought that she might stop drinking coffee once she was allowed to get up later, but she still fixed herself a cup of it every morning – straight black, no sugar, no cream – and one morning, Maria decided to say something to her about it.

"Liesl, I don't know that you should be drinking so much coffee at your age," she said.

Louisa and Brigitta both looked up from their books with panicky look on their faces, staring at Maria as if they were afraid for her. Friedrich leaned forward in his desk and muttered, "Fraulein Maria, you don't mess with Liesl's coffee if you want to live."

But Liesl's reaction was much more controlled. She deliberately took another long, slow sip of coffee, and as she leveled her steely blue eyes at Maria over the cup, Maria saw the defiant old I-don't-need-a-governess girl in that cool gaze. But that battle between them was over, wasn't it?

"Why ever not?" Liesl asked, her voice casual, shrugging a little as she set her coffee down on her desk.

"It can become addictive," Maria said, quoting what she'd heard secondhand, "and for young people, it can stunt your growth and – "

Liesl's light laughter interrupted her. "Well, I'm not so worried about that. I think I'm grown enough."

Maria raised her eyebrows at this, for she thought she knew what Liesl meant by it. The girl might be sixteen, but she could've easily passed for twenty-one. Her father might be oblivious to that, but no doubt the boy who delivered the telegrams had noticed. Maria was grateful that she hadn't seen him come to the villa again since her first night here.

"Besides," Liesl went on, "I've drunken much worse things than coffee, Fraulein Maria. I even..." She pressed her lips into a mischievous smirk, then lowered her voice and continued, "I even drank liquor once."

Maria raised one eyebrow. Liesl could be quite a good liar, but she wasn't fooling Maria with this one. "Oh, really?" she asked nonchalantly. "And just where did you get that?"

"From Fraulein Elinor. She kept flasks of it in her room."

"The hard kind," Friedrich added, in his most serious voice.

It so obvious that the boy didn't know what he was talking about that Maria had to suppress a smirk. Then she glanced around the schoolroom. Marta and Gretl were still in the corner, reading. Maria wanted to foster a love of books in them – a love that would live on in them, she hoped, even long after she'd left their family – so she'd turned one corner of the schoolroom into a cozy reading-nook with a rug and blanket, where Marta was now reading aloud to Gretl. But the other five children were in their desks, listening to Liesl's story and smiling as if it were an old favorite that they'd heard before. Brigitta moved eagerly to the edge of the chair, her chin in her hand.

"Yes, she always said that we drove her to drinking, and I suppose it was true." Liesl paused and took another sip of coffee, enjoying the attention and the break from her schoolwork. "So one night, I was climbing up the trellis to her window, and I think I was going to hide her spectacles – "

"No, you were going to put a toad in her bed," Louisa corrected.

Liesl snapped her fingers. "Oh, that's right, because that's where I found the liquor flask. It was under her bed, and there was still plenty of liquor left in it, and I was curious, so I opened it and drank some. It rather burned at first, but then I drank some more, and that wasn't as bad." She looked at Maria, clearly hoping to see a shocked reaction from her governess.

"You can tell quite a dramatic story, Liesl," Maria said calmly, smiling.

The children looked crestfallen for a moment that Maria hadn't swallowed the tale, but then Liesl brightened. "I can, can't I?" she asked, smiling. "We were planning to tell Father that story for some time. I meant to do it before he left for Vienna again, but then he got that telegram and had to leave the very next morning."

"What did you think of the story, Fraulein Maria?" Brigitta asked, tilting her head. "Liesl practiced another version of it where she drank more of liquor and got tipsy. But we thought that would be too much."

"And the story is partly true, Fraulein Maria," Kurt added eagerly. "I mean, Liesl never drank any, but Fraulein Elinor really did hide liquor under her bed. The upstairs maid found an empty flask one day when she was cleaning... er, I think she found a lot of empty flasks, actually... and anyway, that was the day Father dismissed Fraulein Elinor."

"Oh, and it was so funny, Fraulein Maria. Really, you should've seen it. She said to Father..." Brigitta paused and put on a flouncy, offended voice. "'Well, how else was I supposed to cope with managing all these brats? They would drive a blessed saint to drinking!'"

"And our old downstairs maid got fired from it, too," Friedrich added, "because Frau Schmidt caught her gossiping about it the next day and told Father. Frau Schmidt doesn't allow gossip."

Several of the children were snickering now, remembering the scene, but Maria felt privately horrified, wondering just what they had done to Fraulein Elinor. Had she gotten a pine cone on her chair too, or something much worse? They had told her a few stories about some of their pranks on earlier governesses, but she could sense that they were still holding back the worst of what they'd done. And Maria had known ever since dinner during her first night here, when the children all started crying over their plates, that they weren't crying from guilt over the frog in her pocket. No, they were remembering far worse things they'd done and crying over that.

Maria shook her head faintly. The other question, of course, was how, even after an episode like that, had their father still believed that hiring governesses was the best course of action for his children?

"Fraulein Maria, you're from an abbey," Louisa said, as if she'd just remembered. "Do you think we would drive a blessed saint to drinking?"

Maria laced her fingers together. She was standing between the blackboard and Kurt's desk, where she'd been helping him with a math problem before the conversation turned to coffee and liquor. "I think Fraulein Elinor quite overestimated you," she said firmly. Louisa raised her eyebrows at this, looking surprised and a little skeptic. "If your father had ever hired a saint for your governess, all of you probably would've been whipped into shape right away. Most of the saints had to deal with much worse things than seven unruly children, you know."

"Did they?" Kurt asked, his round face looking at her sideways. "Like what?"

"Oh, all sorts of terrible things." She walked back to the front of the classroom as she spoke. She had learned quite a lot about the saints during her time at Nonnberg Abbey – it was some of the only interesting reading material there – and she was glad to be able to teach the children about a subject that she knew well for a change. "Being forced to fight gladiators. Having to flee their homelands at a moment's notice. Or having to hide other Christians from the emperor; they risked their own lives in doing so."

"Really?" asked Friedrich, exchanging an impressed look with Kurt. "I never knew that. I thought the saints were all simpering wimps."

"Oh no, far from it," Maria said, laughing a little. She searched her mind for a particularly gruesome martyrdom that the boys would like. "Did you know that Saint Sebastian miraculously survived being tied to a tree and shot with arrows."

"Did you say Saint Sebastian?" Brigitta asked, sitting up straighter. "There's a church to Saint Sebastian here in Salzburg."

"Can we visit it on our next outing, Fraulein Maria?" Kurt wanted to know.

It was hard to say no to Kurt when he gave her that smile, and besides, that did sound like a good idea for an outing. Maria was still taking the children on outings regularly, alternating between her mountains or some new part of the city, and this church was a spot that they hadn't visited yet.

"Only if you lot can get through the rest of the morning with no more interruptions." The children all got back to work at that, but Maria noticed that Liesl glanced her way before taking a long, deliberate sip of her coffee. Well, let her have her coffee, Maria decided. She had come to quite like this time of the day, when the children's minds were fresh and curious, and they were all relatively still, sitting in their desks. It made a nice change from their afternoons, when they all ran outside to play and explore as if they'd been cooped up for years. Of course, Maria liked that time of the day, too, but for now, she decided to enjoy having peace and quiet in the schoolroom again.


P.S. I almost titled this chapter "Sinners and Saints," instead of "Coffee and Liquor." Please let me know which one you like better! :)